Thursday, March 27, 2008

New US News Law School Rankings: Four In Massachusetts Among Top 100

The blog Above the Law has announced the prematurely leaked US News and World Report "2009" rankings of American law schools, set to be released officially this Friday. You can see the first page, showing the top 100 of the nation's 184 American Bar Association (ABA) accredited law schools ranked by the magazine here.

As usual, the three top-tier law schools in Massachusetts continue to rank in or near their usual places, with Harvard at number two (behind Yale), Boston University at number 21, and Boston College at number 26.

Only one other Massachusetts law school, Northeastern University, also made it into the top 100, by getting into a seven-way tie for number 88 (actually 88-94). Northeastern University has not always been in the top 100, and has in the past often shared a spot in the bottom half of law schools, in the third or fourth quartile, with the rest of the Massachusetts law schools.

Not listed in the top 100, and therefore presumably to appear in their usual places among the bottom half of ABA-accredited U.S. law schools, are the following schools: Suffolk University Law School, New England School of Law, and Western New England School of Law. (A further school, the Massachusetts College of Law in Andover, is not even accredited by the ABA.)

It is interesting to note that many general practitioners, family court and other state court judges, and family lawyers in particular, graduated from either Suffolk or New England School of Law, or the even less prestigious law schools of this state, and very few went to one of the top-tier law schools. Certainly, the lawyers who were educated at Harvard, BU and BC are more likely to be found working in corporate law firms than in general practice areas like family law. What does this mean? We family lawyers don't really like to think about the obvious answers to that question, so you can keep your answers to yourself, thank you very much!